The Summer in French Shorts opens with a widely diverse program bringing together six titles from the UniFrance Short Film Awards 2020: three action films, one animated film, a documentary, and an experimental work.
Cultes, a physical and sensual trip produced by the (LA) HORDE collective. This is a is a true ode to dance and life that explores mass practices and cultures in the ritualistic and consumerist spaces of major music festivals.
Mathilde Profit began directing with her short film First Goodbyes, a sensitive portrait of a father/daughter relationship captured just at the point the student daughter is about to move to Paris.
Pipo and Blind Love, an Orwellian-inspired tale directed by Hugo Le Gourrierec, gently accompanies us in the discovery of emotions in a working-class dystopia.
Ali's Circle, directed by Antoine Beauvois-Boetti, is a contemporary tale that sensitively recounts the journey of a young Afghan, from his first buzkashi match to his daily struggle as an "undocumented immigrant" in Paris.
The Year of the Robot by Yves Gellie is a documentary which, through a long period of observing and connecting with elderly people in geriatric hospitals and nursing homes, explores with great tenderness, lightness, and even humour, the range of possible relationships between human beings and robots.
With Homeless Home, short and feature film director Alberto Vázquez brings to the forefront the choices and non-choices of a group of young people in a dark world of heroic-fantasy.
Some of these films have already attracted attention at film festivals.
To learn more, click here.
Cultes (2019)
Fiction – Experimental – Documentary – 15 mins
Language: English
Themes: Art, Dance
Producers: Hirvi (Nérimen Hadrami – Elsa Rakotoson) – TETRO (Matthieu Debay)
Synopsis
An hallucinatory trip into the heart of a crowd, of a community of bodies welded together by their love of music, bodies that dance but which never forget to feel.
(LA) HORDE (Marine BRUTTI – Jonathan DEBROUWER – Arthur HAREL)
First Goodbyes (2019)
Fiction – 24 mins
Language: French with English subtitles
Themes: Adolescence, family
Producer: Apaches films (Jeanne Ezvan – Marthe Lamy)
Sales agent: Shortcuts (Élise Notseck)
Synopsis
A father takes his daughter to Paris to begin her student life, a new life in an unfamiliar city, far from her childhood and from him. This journey is their first journey together and perhaps their last. Nothing seems exceptional and yet they both know that they must say goodbye to each other.
Pipo and Blind Love (2019)
Fiction – Tale – Myth – Strange – Fantasy – 13 mins
No dialogue with English subtitles
Themes: Love, music, poetry, imagination
Producer: IKO (Igal Kohen)
Sales agent: Premium Films (Jean-Charles Mille)
Synopsis
In a dehumanized world where emotions are rationed and measured by gauges, Pipo, a young worker, falls under the spell of a young woman sitting on a bench. He will do everything he can to attract her attention and to seduce her with words of his own.
Ali's Circle (2019)
Fiction – Portrait – 15 mins
Language: French with English subtitles
Themes: Immigration, society, conflict, politics
Producers: H Rouge Productions (Arthur Beauvois) – Lionceau Films (Marie-Mars Prieur)
Sales agent: L'Agence du court métrage (Florence Keller)
Synopsis
In a reception centre, Salman, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan man, prepares for his hearing at the National Court of Asylum, forcing him to confront the memory of his first and only game of buzkashi, Afghanistan's national sport.
The Year of the Robot (2019)
Documentary – Video art – 31 mins
Language: French with English subtitles
Themes: Futurist, human nature, science and technology
Producer: upian. (Alexandre Brachet – Camille Lacharmoise)
Sales agents: Iskra (Matthieu de Laborde) – L'Agence du court métrage (Florence Keller)
Synopsis
At the crossroads of art and science, The Year of the Robot looks at human beings and their artificial double, the robot. Like a series of archives explaining the first contact and dialogue between a robot and human beings, it studies the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, the minuscule and mysterious relational space which opens out between these two players.
Homeless Home (2020)
Animation – Drama – Black humor – 15 mins
Language: Spanish with French and English subtitles
Producers: Autour de Minuit (Nicolas Schmerkin) – uniko – (Iván Miñambres)
Sales agent: Autour de Minuit (Annabel Sebag)
Synopsis
No one can escape their roots, however rotten they may be.
Alberto Vázquez
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